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HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
Administering
Use the administration tools that are provided with the HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
Virtual portals
View information on how you can scope your HCL Portal to have multiple virtual portals.
Virtual portals reference
The virtual portals reference provides information about using commands for configuring virtual portals, usage hints and tips, and known limitations.
Known limitations for virtual portals
The following sections describe known limitations of virtual portals.
Scope of virtual portals
HCL has tested an installation with 300 virtual portals and a total of more than 200,000 pages successfully. More detailed results of these tests are listed here.

HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
- Overview
  HCL Digital Experience provides a single access point to web content and applications, while it delivers differentiated, personalized experiences for each user across multiple touchpoints, such as web, mobile, hybrid mobile/web applications, and more.
- Supported migration paths
  Migration is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Supported installation and upgrade paths
  Installation and upgrade is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Getting the software
  New and existing users need to register at the HCL Software License Portal and download their entitled HCL Digital Experience package(s).
- Creating your website
  Review the following topics to understand how to create your website using the latest HCL Digital Experience.
- Installing HCL Digital Experience
  Review the planning information on HCL Digital Experience, then select your operating system and installation pattern that most reflects your business needs.
- Configuring
  Run the following tasks after you install and deploy HCL Digital Experience. They address tasks that are typically run one time and have a global effect. Some configuration changes are made more frequently or do not have a global effect. These tasks are addressed in the Administering section.
- Backup and restore
  Backup and recovery of data files and databases is an essential operation for any business system, particularly for data and applications that run in production environments. Create and follow a plan for backing up and recovering data on all tiers of your HCL Digital Experience deployment. IBM Installation Manager must also be included in backup and recovery planning. If you back up the HCL Portal file structure and then install a fix pack, your HCL Digital Experience and IBM Installation Manager become out of sync after you restore the HCL Portal file system. This condition is not recoverable.
- Migrating
  Successful migration requires significant planning and preparation, understanding the tools that are involved, and careful execution of the appropriate steps in the order provided.
- Integrating
  Integrate HCL Digital Experience with software such as HCL Sametime to enable your users to collaborate more easily. You can also use the unified task list portlet to integrate HCL with your backend business process software, such as IBM Process Server.
- Administering
  Use the administration tools that are provided with the HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
  - Roadmap: Syndication
    Syndication is the tool that is used to replicate data from a web content library on one server to a web content library on another server. The relationship between a syndicator and a subscriber can be either a one-way or two-way relationship.
  - Portal administration tools
    Learn about the different tools that you can use to administer your portal.
  - Web content administration tools
    HCL Web Content Manager includes tasks and tools to help maintain your content management system. For example, use the member fixer task to resolve renamed or deleted users and user groups. Use the workflow checker and updater tools to modify workflow security settings, reschedule pending actions, and add workflow to items. Web Content Manager also includes tools to assist with library and item management, and item and version history management.
  - Starting and stopping servers
    Various installation and configuration tasks require you to start and stop IBM WebSphere Application Server and the HCL Digital Experience application servers, deployment managers, and node agents.
  - Users and groups
    HCL Digital Experience offers you centralized administration of users and user groups, allowing you to better define users and manage user access rights. Users can register and manage their own account information, or an administrator can provision and manage users. Group memberships can be used to give the required permissions to access an object or perform a request.
  - Managing portlets, portlet applications, and iWidgets
    You must do some preparatory tasks before you make your portlets, portlet applications, or iWidgets available to your users by putting them on portal pages. This preparatory task includes installing, deploying, and configuring portlets, applications, and iWidgets.
  - Administering managed pages
    You can run advanced administration tasks for managed pages, such as generating URLs for projects or working with projects by using scripts, or working with vanity URLs.
  - Manage pages portlets
    Use Manage Pages to create, edit, activate, order, and delete pages and external web pages and labels.
  - Managing theme capabilities
    You can administer the theme module framework. This includes deploying resources that can be cached, configuring capability filters, and disabling the automatic prerequisite loading feature.
  - Managing community pages
    Community associations associate a portal page with a community in HCL Connections.
  - Managing your cluster
    After installing and configuring your clustered environment, you will need to manage the different parts of your cluster to ensure a highly available production environment.
  - Managing your site
    Earlier versions of HCL Digital Experience provided the Resource Manager portlet for performing site management. With Version 8.0 of HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager, this site management functionality has been replaced by the new functionality for managing pages.
  - Tagging and rating
    Get an overview of the administrative tasks related to tagging and rating.
  - Using WebDAV with HCL Portal
    HCL Digital Experience provides a Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) implementation that individual services can use by plugging into. WebDAV is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allows you to collaborate on editing and managing files on remote Web servers.
  - Virtual portals
    View information on how you can scope your HCL Portal to have multiple virtual portals.
    - Deciding about virtual portals
      Get an overview of possible business and usage scenarios for virtual portals. Decide whether your business scenario is suitable for virtual portals. Get some ideas and hints about what you need to consider when you plan for your virtual portals. This can help you determine whether your business can work with virtual portals, how many virtual portals it requires, and how, and for which purposes you will use them. Based on your decision, you can then plan how you implement and configure your virtual portals.
    - Planning for virtual portals
      Before you create your virtual portals, review this information for planning purposes. Determine how many virtual portals your business requires, and how and for which purposes you will use them. Based on your decision, plan how you implement and configure your virtual portals.
    - Virtual portals and managed pages
      Virtual portals are created and managed through the portal administration interface with the Virtual Portal Manager portlet. When you create a virtual portal, a workspace is created that contains a new Portal Site web content library. Any managed pages that are created in the virtual portal are stored in the Portal Site library.
    - Administering virtual portals
      View information to help you scope your HCL Portal to have multiple virtual portals.
    - Working with the Virtual Portal Manager portlet
      For improved manageability of virtual portals, HCL Digital Experience provides an administration portlet. It is named Virtual Portal Manager. It allows you to create virtual portals on demand. You can also use it to preconfigure and administer virtual portals.
    - Virtual portals reference
      The virtual portals reference provides information about using commands for configuring virtual portals, usage hints and tips, and known limitations.
      - Virtual portals command reference
        You can configure virtual portals by using portal configuration tasks or the XML configuration interface.
      - Hints and tips for working with virtual portals
        View information about configuring virtual portals, hints and tips, and known limitations in HCL Digital Experience.
      - Known limitations for virtual portals
        The following sections describe known limitations of virtual portals.
        Scope of virtual portals
        HCL has tested an installation with 300 virtual portals and a total of more than 200,000 pages successfully. More detailed results of these tests are listed here.
        Using a new host name for an existing virtual portal
        If you want to use a new host name for an existing virtual portal, you must delete the virtual portal. Then, re-create it with the new host name.
        Change of theme for virtual portal might not take effect
        If you change the theme for a virtual portal by editing the virtual portal in the Virtual Portals portlet, this change affects only the root page of the virtual portal.
  - Language support
    To reach as many users as possible, HCL Digital Experience supports different languages for different locations. For instance, a large, international corporation might address users in different countries or regions through multilingual Web sites. In this context the portal can concurrently serve portal views to large numbers of users, each in the user's preferred language.
  - WSRP services
    By using the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard. HCL Digital Experience can provide portlets, applications, and content as WSRP services.
  - Browser behavior and scenarios
    Browser behavior for the back button, bookmarks and history affect user interaction and cause unexpected results.
- Securing
  Security tasks include setting up property extension databases and custom user repositories, configuring and activating SSL, and configuring authentication. In addition, tasks such as activating Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and NIST SP800-131a security modules and configuring external security managers such as Security Access Manager might be required to secure your portal environment.
- Monitoring
  HCL Portal includes tools and features to help you monitor the portal site.
- Setting up a website
  Setting up a website includes, creating pages, adding navigation, setting up search, and adding content to the site. Themes are used to customize the portal's look-and-feel. Out-of-the-box templates and the site wizard can help you set up your portal site faster. You can add wikis and blogs to your site and let users tag and rate content on your site.
- Staging to production
  During portal solution development, the solution is initially developed, tested, and refined on one server or a limited number of servers. The solution is deployed later on live systems, referred to as the production environment. The process of moving the solution from the development environment to the production environment is called staging.
- Developing
  This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager.
- Docker and Containerization
  Find topic information about Docker and Containerization for HCL Digital Experience.
- Practitioner Studio
  Practitioner Studio is a newly designed user experience for HCL Digital Experience. Please see the following pages to understand how the new navigation is organized.
- HCL Experience API
  This shows developers how to provision, configure, and use the HCL Experience API with the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 platform.
- HCL Content Composer
  The HCL Content Composer delivers simplified processes for creating and managing Digital Experience site content.
- HCL Digital Asset Management
  HCL Digital Asset Management (DAM) adds a central platform to store and include rich media assets in Digital Experience site content to present engaging, consistently branded experiences across digital channels.
- The Woodburn Studio demo site
  The Woodburn Studio is a website that demonstrates the use of some of the popular HCL Digital Experience features.
- Reference
  View information that can help you use our product documentation including terms of use, trademarks, and more.

Scope of virtual portals | HCL Digital Experience

HCL has tested an installation with 300 virtual portals and a total of more than 200,000 pages successfully. More detailed results of these tests are listed here.

An IBM® WebSphere® Application Server 64-bit environment is suited best for a large number of virtual portals.
For good results, you need to tune the portal caches and JVM.
The limiting factor is not the absolute number of virtual portals, but the overall number of pages and URL mappings.
In a limit and boundary test, the processor of the portal database machine was found to be the bottleneck.
A large number of virtual portals can have an overall performance impact on administrative activities.
Setting up and administering a large number of virtual portals by using the portal administration user interface can be time consuming.